Kinda OT: CPU upgrades, looking for recommendations for 3D/gaming performance
SnowSultan
Posts: 3,643
I'm thinking a little of upgrading my fairly old CPU, but of course, it's never that easy because it also involves a new motherboard and a nightmarish day of sorting wires, downloading drivers, stuff not working like it should, and keeping cats away the whole time. Anyway, here's a comparison between my current CPU (the i7-5820K) and two other popular ones that are within my price range.
I have some questions that I was hoping someone might be able to answer if you have a moment.
* I have an nVidia 2080ti graphics card, and ensuring that continues to work as expected is a priority.
* Does older RAM still fit into newer motherboards? I don't know if I'll have to replace the RAM too depending on the board I'll need.
* Although the graph in that comparison shows a large increase over my current CPU, could someone explain how that might translate to real-world performance in 3D work (mostly DAZ Studio, Unreal Engine, etc) or in gaming?
Thank you very much, and any recommendations other than what I listed here are welcomed of course.
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I have exclusively used AMD CPUs for around 20 years now and they have always worked fine. Intel CPUs are fine and they keep jockying for which is the "best" at any given moment, but AMD is less expensive and currently uses less power.
Your graphics card should work fine in either of the new motherboards you would have to buy. In fact, it may even work better, since the new motherboard is likely to fully support it.
Unless your old motherboard used DDR4 RAM, you will have to buy new RAM.
The new CPU and motherboard shouldn't make any difference for IRAY, but may make a noticable difference for 3Delight renders. It may also be noticable in preview mode. I have no idea on the other programs. Some of the newer games are hungry for all the computing power they can get, so if you play newer AAA games, you should see an improvement.
If you want to save money, you might want to consider a 3rd generation Ryzen CPU instead of the 4th generation CPU you listed. The Ryzen 7 3800X should work just fine and you save $50 which can help with the RAM.
https://www.bestbuy.com/site/amd-ryzen-7-3800x-3rd-generation-8-core-16-thread-3-9-ghz-4-5-ghz-max-boost-socket-am4-unlocked-desktop-processor/6356636.p?skuId=6356636
Disclaimer: I'm not an AMD person. I've worked with Intel since forever, but recently I had to dip into the AMD world and kept running into hints that there is some special requirement for some RAM used with some AMD Ryzen CPU's. I asked these forums for a clarification on the reason for catalogs sometimes advertizing "RAM for AMD" right next to nearly the same product without processor association, but got no replies for that specific question.
So, my point being if you're going the AMD route with your upgrade, be aware that there could be a problem migrating old RAM from an Intel board onto a new AMD motherboard/CPU situation. Also, if you read the customer ratings for RAM in the NewEgg or Amazon catalogs you can find a lot of 1-star ratings that say quite flatly that it was an AMD system that their new RAM wouldn't work in but would work in an Intel system.
I would really like to know why there might be a special feature of RAM for some AMD CPUs or motherboards. Anybody?
I belive it has to do with the XMP profiles on some of the RAM out there. Since XMP is an Intel feature for overclocking RAM (up to the speed that it's sold as), some of thatXMP enabled RAM will not overclock to that speed on AMD platforms. This may be because the AMD motherboard and CPU want to run the RAM at the advertised speed all the time instead of just boosting te speed on an as needed basis.
I would just add that much of DS is single threaded, which means you may wish to place more emphasis on single core performance (as opposed to going for more total cores).
- Greg
ETA: I only just now looked at the benchmark results that you posted. Based on those, it's a complete no-brainer. However, real life results may vary. A couple of years ago, I purchased a couple of HP 2-in1 laptops (one Flagship and one Envy). The Envy (AMD) is a higher end line, and more expensive (about $150 more from the same source), yet the Flagship's (Intel) performance is more responsive for many tasks. I would try to get some application specific benches that are relavant to you if possible.
Nope, no AMD specific RAM
https://hardwarecanucks.com/memory/choosing-the-best-amd-ryzen-5000-memory-a-beginners-guide/
"...And that led to highly clocked single-rank DDR4 performing better than lower clocked dual-rank DDR4 on early Ryzen systems. This is where the legend that dual-rank memory was bad with all Ryzen CPUs got started..."
I've got the Ryzen 7 3800xt and 4x 32GB DDR4(3200) ram cards all plugged in to an MSI X570 Unify motherboard.The XMP profiles didn't work for me out of the box.The system booted and ran just fine, but the RAM was underclocked to 2666 and the dram voltage was set to 1.2v instead of gskill's required 1.35v minimum.
I had to pull one of the cards.Change the clock speed and voltage manually in the BIOS(very simple with the MSI X570 Unify motherboard).I also unchecked the box to check for ram changes during boot..After power down and reinstalling the last RAM card it's all been rock solid since.
Which ever CPU you choose to go with, make sure you get the correct RAM for your motherboard/CPU combo.Every CPUs need RAM that is compatible with both the CPU and motherboard.
I'm an AMD fan, so I would get the Ryzen 7 5800 configuration if the budget allowed.I've even considered getting that CPU as an upgrade for myself.I'm waiting to see if I can get an Ryzen 9 5950x first.
Thanks for the information so far. My RAM is a set of Corsair Vengeance LPX 32 GB (4 x 8 GB) DDR4-2133, so I guess it would still work in a new motherboard? That's a relief. :)
The thing is that I'm not really noticing any problems with performance, either in Studio or in gaming. That's why I'm curious to know what these supposed large performance chart increases would actually do. Would a better CPU help with having more figures or higher-res geometry in a scene, or is that more dependent on RAM? I guess I just find it odd that my machine is able to handle fairly complex 3D scenes and play modern games well with such an old CPU.
Hell yes! My old 2600x wasn't a slouch, but when I upgraded to 3900x, wow. It's a huge difference. Before, I would experience a lot of pose lag, like I would start spinning a slider, and it would lag a bit, then catch up. That was with only two or three figures in scene. I tried an experiment when I got this new one. I just kept loading different random G8 characters into the scene, tested for pose lag, added another, tested etc etc etc. I was able to load 49 or 50 I think, never got pose lag at all, daz just crashed on me while attempting to load the last one in.
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/6645766/#Comment_6645766
There is the screenshot of my G8F army experement lol
Interesting, thanks for that (and nice job cramming all those figures into one scene). :) It just occured to me that I may have experienced that bottlenecking a while back when I tried playing a modern game on a 4K TV; the room quickly became very hot and the game started lagging, but I chalked it up to having my game settings too high. It was probably the CPU unable to keep up, as we didn't even have 4K resolutions when that CPU was released.
I probably will end up upgrading after all, and I think I'll feel better sticking with Intel, I've never used anything else and it's never failed me. I do not plan on overclocking anything though (reliabilty and longevity are much more important to me than getting 64 fps instead of 60 fps), so if anyone has any additional recommendations on out-of-the-box Intel CPUs and compatible motherboards, I'd very much appreciate hearing your thoughts. Thanks to everyone so far for your advice.
One more quick question if you don't mind. After a lot of research, I'm probably going to go with the following CPU and motherboard:
https://pcpartpicker.com/product/wW7p99/intel-core-i9-10900-28-ghz-10-core-processor-bx8070110900 (I don't have any plans to overclock, thus didn't get the K version)
https://pcpartpicker.com/product/gW7p99/msi-meg-z490-unify-atx-lga1200-motherboard-meg-z490-unify
That motherboard doesn't have a PCI-e 4.0 slot (and my 2080ti is not a 4.0 card), but I wonder if anyone knows if having a 4.0 card (like a 3080 or 3090) in a 4.0 slot would give any sort of noticable performance increase in 3D rendering. The articles I've read say that the current advantages of 4.0 over 3.0 are miniscule (like 2%), but I'd like to hear from actual 3D artists who may have such a build.
Thanks again for any information.
Either will work, and should work at the advertised speeds BUT if you don't buy memory for the brand CPU you will need to set all the memory's timings manually to do so. There's a lot of settings and going to be daunting to a newbie. Often involves futzing around with a bunch of hangs and reboots tuning the memory settings.
Memory designed for Intel systems will typically have an XMP profile, memory for AMD systems will typically have a DOCP profile basically AMD's equivalent of XMP. It's plug and play to get the optimal speed out of your memory. Pop it in, set for XMP or DOCP, and go.
I'd opt for the AMD platform and get the PCIE 4.0. The 5800x is a bit more than the 10900 with 8 vs 10 cores, but slightly faster overall. Most importantly for gaming & Daz, single core speed is significantly faster (10%). That's where you'll see the most gain.
https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i9-10900-vs-AMD-Ryzen-7-5800X/m1169242vs4085
I have just finished putting together a Ryzen 5000 CPU system with PCIE 4.0 slots. I have a RTX 3090 that was in my older PCIE 3.0 system that I have installed in the new one. I am about to install Daz and can let you know what differences I see.
I ended up ordering the i9-10900, but thank you very much for the advice. I'm not that worried about losing 2%-10% when I actually find my current system to already be fairly satisfactory. I would be interested in hearing what you discover about the 3090 in the 4.0 slot though, thanks. You were lucky to get one. ;) Even my 2080ti is going for $3000 on some sites, it's nuts.
Past testing showed no performance differences with PCIe spec for Iray. Pugent tested this by reducing the x16 in half to x8, and there was no change. I don't believe it makes any difference for Iray at this time. Maybe it can in the future somehow since tech is always changing. But we have the Iray benchmark thread, and lots of people have tested 3090s with different builds, some are Intel and thus 3.0 and some have been Ryzen with 4.0. They are basically the same, with other factors, like VRAM and GPU core clock speeds being the difference if there is any. It does appear that VRAM speed can have a great impact on rendering. So overclocking the VRAM some can be one of the easiest ways to get extra Iray performance.
If you are a gamer, then the 4.0 may be a factor in the future as it becomes more mainstream. Also, your RAM speed of 2400 is kind of low. I'd be more concerned about that effecting some frame times than anything else. For Daz it makes no difference, but you want the higher frame rates in gaming that very well can effect performance.
I am curious, have you had any issues with 32GB of RAM for Daz? Since you have a 2080ti with 11GB, do you use all that VRAM? I could hit that mark wih 1080ti, so I went with 64GB when I built my new PC.
When it comes to gaming, the CPU can be the bottleneck at lower resolutions. If you moved on to 4K gaming then the GPU is going to be the bottleneck in most cases, so if you do game at 4K you might not see a huge uplift. But if you game at 1440p you might see a pretty solid boost. And if you do any 1080p, the gains can be massive. I like doing 1440p myself because I can hit really high frame rates at that resolution in most games, now that I have a 5800X.
If it was hot in your room when the game throttled a bit, it might have been thermal throttling that hit your performance at that time. Your ambient temps can effect that. You can use an app to monitor performance and perhaps get a hint to what may be happening if it does it again.
Thank you for that information, very helpful. I don't think I'm really experiencing slowing in gaming at 2400 RAM speed and this 7 year old CPU, which is kind of surprising. I play at 1440p with high settings (sometimes the highest) and it's still fine. Guess the 2080ti really does handle all of the heavy lifting.
Now the amount of RAM might be something I haven't considered when it comes to Studio. I've only hit the VRAM limit when trying to render DAZ figures in Blender (not sure why but I abandoned Blender after it warned me of memory when I was rendering one figure), but I have had a few DAZ Studio scenes render completely black unless I either reduced the render output size or hid some geometry. I thought 32 GB was enough and I'm not sure I can afford to buy an all new faster 64 GB right now, but I will definitely consider it.